The New York State Comptroller’s report “Violent and Disruptive Incidents and Bullying in New York Schools” was released on February 2 2026. It documents seven school years of statewide and NYC data through school year 2023-24, the most recent year for which State Education Department data is available.
NYC’s bullying rate jumped from 10.5 incidents per 1,000 students in school year 2019-20 to 25.8 in 2023-24. That is a 146 percent increase from the pre-pandemic baseline. Upstate over the same period was essentially flat.
The numbers are also almost certainly low. The NYC DOE’s own student survey for the same year found that 51 percent of NYC students reported that students harass, bully, or intimidate each other in their school. The State Education Department’s official count captured roughly 2.6 percent of students as bullying targets. A twentyfold gap.
What follows is what the report actually says, what the data structure can and cannot tell, and what the legal framework for NYC families looks like in 2026.
The NYC Trend
The DiNapoli report tracks NYC’s bullying rate per 1,000 pupils across seven school years.
| School year | NYC bullying rate per 1,000 |
|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 14.5 |
| 2018-19 | 12.1 |
| 2019-20 | 10.5 |
| 2020-21 | (remote learning, near zero) |
| 2021-22 | 18.7 |
| 2022-23 | 24.3 |
| 2023-24 | 25.8 |
The 2019-20 baseline of 10.5 per 1,000 is the pre-pandemic figure. The 2023-24 figure of 25.8 is the most recent. The 146 percent increase is calculated from those two endpoints.
The report attributes part of the NYC-only spike to a structural cause. NYC revised its Chancellor’s Regulation A-832 in October 2021, broadening the definition of bullying and harassment and clarifying that the policy applies during remote learning. A broader definition produces more incidents that meet the definition. Some of the post-2019-20 NYC growth reflects the rule change, not just changes in conduct.
The Statewide Picture
Statewide for 2023-24, the report documents 29,718 reported bullying incidents. The overall rate is 12.4 per 1,000 students. Excluding the 1,734 schools that reported zero bullying, the rate rises to 18.2 per 1,000 in reporting schools.
| Region | 2023-24 bullying rate per 1,000 |
|---|---|
| NYC | 25.8 |
| Downstate excluding NYC | 12.3 |
| Upstate | 12.0 |
| Statewide overall | 12.4 |
| Statewide reporting schools only | 18.2 |
NYC outpaced both regional comparison groups by more than two to one. Statewide bullying rose from 10.2 per 1,000 in 2017-18 to 18.2 per 1,000 in 2023-24, an overall 78 percent increase, with most of the increase driven by NYC.
Bullying accounted for 61.8 percent of all reported SSEC incidents in 2023-24, the most-reported category statewide. Cyberbullying was reported separately at 4,396 incidents statewide, a rate of 1.8 per 1,000 overall and 4.4 per 1,000 in reporting schools.
The Drugs Number
The report’s other headline finding is on drug incidents. The statewide secondary school drug-related rate reached 6.5 per 1,000 students in 2023-24, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. The OSC press release describes this as the highest rate since SED began the SSEC reporting framework.
The geographic distribution is the inverse of the bullying pattern. Upstate secondary schools recorded 9.8 drug incidents per 1,000 students. Downstate excluding NYC recorded 6.2. NYC recorded 4.2.
For drugs, NYC is below the statewide average. For bullying, NYC is more than double it.
The Underreporting Problem
The most consequential finding in the report is not in the headline numbers. It is in the gap between what schools report and what students experience.
| Comparison | Schools reporting zero bullying or cyberbullying |
|---|---|
| All NY public schools 2023-24 | 34.9% |
| All elementary schools statewide | 47.7% |
| NYC non-charter public schools | 6.1% |
| NY public schools outside NYC | 34.4% |
| NYC charter schools | 56.5% |
NYC non-charter schools are the most consistent reporters in the state at 6.1 percent reporting zero. Schools outside NYC are nearly six times more likely to report zero. NYC charter schools are nine times more likely to report zero than NYC district schools.
Cross-survey validation reinforces the underreporting concern. The NYC DOE administered the NYC School Survey in 2023-24. Fifty-one percent of NYC students reported that students harass, bully, or intimidate each other in their school. The SSEC data for the same year reflected approximately 2.6 percent of NYC students as bullying targets. A twentyfold gap.
The CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey for 2022-23 reported that 18.9 percent of NYC high schoolers said they had been bullied, compared with 21.5 percent outside NYC. The CDC self-report data is roughly an order of magnitude higher than the SSEC institutional report.
The DiNapoli report cites a prior OSC audit of NYCDOE finding that bullying data was “underreported, misreported and sometimes not reported at all.” Mirrors prior OSC audits of SED’s VADIR and DASA implementation that reached the same conclusion.
The category most likely to be missing from the report is the same category the report is built on.
The DASA Framework
The legal scaffolding for the data is the Dignity for All Students Act, codified at NY Education Law §§ 10 through 18. DASA was signed by Governor Paterson on September 13 2010 and took effect July 1 2012. The act was amended effective July 1 2013 to add cyberbullying at Education Law § 11(8).
DASA requires school districts to develop policies and procedures for the prevention of harassment, bullying, and discrimination. The implementing data collection runs through the SSEC report, which combines DASA-required reporting with VADIR data. SSEC categories include assault, sexual offense, weapons possession, drugs, alcohol, discrimination, harassment, bullying, and cyberbullying.
The serious-incident categories (assault, sexual offense, weapons) have rates that are now near zero statewide. The DiNapoli report describes this as a methodological artifact rather than a real safety improvement. SED revised the definitions in 2021-22 to require felony-level conduct, age 10 or older, and police referral. The revised definitions exclude many incidents that would have been reportable under the prior framework.
Statewide rates in 2023-24: sexual offense at approximately 0.9 per 1,000, weapons possession at approximately 2.1 per 1,000, assault similarly suppressed.
The Legal Framework for Families
When NYC bullying produces an injury that a family wants to litigate, several legal vehicles are available. The procedural deadlines and elements differ across them.
Title IX
The leading federal precedent is Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999). A Title IX private damages action lies against a school where the school had actual knowledge of student-on-student harassment, acted with deliberate indifference, and the harassment was so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it deprived the student of educational access. The Davis standard is high but it has been met in NYC cases.
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Disability-based bullying claims proceed under these federal statutes. The 2d Circuit recognized in T.K. v. NYC DOE (2016) that bullying of a disabled student can constitute denial of free appropriate public education under the IDEA framework. The Section 504 and ADA claims do not require IDEA exhaustion in many circumstances.
42 U.S.C. § 1983
Equal protection claims are available under where a NYC DOE policy or custom violates the constitutional protections of an identified class.
State Law Negligent Supervision Against NYC DOE
The leading NY Court of Appeals precedent is Mirand v. City of New York, 84 N.Y.2d 44 (1994). NYC DOE owes students an in loco parentis duty to supervise with the care of a reasonably prudent parent. The standard reaches student-on-student conduct that the school knew or should have known about and failed to prevent.
Notice of Claim Under GML § 50-e
The Child Victims Act revival window has expired. NYC paid more than $160 million in CVA settlements through October 2024, with 135 of 161 NYC settlements against the DOE or former DOE staff per the City & State NY analysis. Many of those cases involved school personnel abuse rather than peer-on-peer bullying, but the architecture of NYC DOE accountability for student harm runs through the same procedural framework.
What’s Pending
State Senator James Tedisco of Glenville has tied the DiNapoli report to Senate Bill S.16, also called Jacobe’s Law. The bill would require schools to notify the parents of both the bullied student and the bully. The bill is named for Jacobe Taras, age 13, of Moreau, NY, who died by suicide in April 2015 after experiencing school bullying that had not been disclosed to his parents. The bill has passed the Senate twice and stalled in the Assembly. The DiNapoli report has revived the legislative debate.
The new Mamdani administration appointed Kamar Samuels as NYC schools chancellor in early 2026. As of the report’s release, the new chancellor had not issued a public response. The structural problem the report identifies, of NYC reporting being more consistent than the rest of the state but still capturing only a fraction of student-reported bullying, sits at the new administration’s door.
Why the Numbers Matter
The DiNapoli report is the most authoritative public dataset on NYC school bullying. It is also, by the report’s own admission, an undercount.
For families with a NYC student facing bullying, the report establishes two points. First, the conduct is widespread enough to support a deliberate-indifference claim under Davis when the institutional response fails. Schools cannot credibly claim they did not know that bullying was a known and significant risk in their district. Second, the institutional reporting that should be the contemporaneous record of harassment frequently does not capture what students experience. Families who pursue a case will often need to rebuild that record from contemporaneous student reports, parent communications, counselor notes, and peer testimony, not from the official SSEC data.
The numbers are the floor. The cases are built above the floor.
